Set Up NGINX

If you don't want HTTPS (for communications between the external world and your node), then you can skip all the NGINX steps on this page.

Note: This simple deployment template uses NGINX for more than just HTTPS. For example, it also does basic rate limiting.

Install NGINX

SSH into your machine and install NGINX:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx

Get an SSL certificate for your node's subdomain (such as bnode.example.com).

Copy the SSL private key into /etc/nginx/ssl/cert.key
Create a "PEM file" (text file) by concatenating your SSL certificate with all intermediate certificates (in that order, with the intermediate certs last).
Copy that PEM file into /etc/nginx/ssl/cert.pem
In the bigchaindb/bigchaindb repository on GitHub, find the file nginx/nginx.conf and copy its contents to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf on your machine (i.e. replace the existing file there).
Edit that file (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf): replace the two instances of the string example.testnet2.com with your chosen subdomain (such as bnode.example.com).
Reload NGINX by doing:
```
sudo service nginx reload
```